Medical publishing zig-zag from Zagazig

The Retraction Watch blog, chronicler of scientific publishing twistyness, reports: Warts and all: Derm pub retracts plantar paper after author cries foul A group of Egyptian dermatologists seems to have hit on a novel solution to the problem of uncooperative images: Fabrication. The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology has retracted a paper it […]

Why companies don’t do experiments

Dan Ariely (who won an Ig Nobel Prize for showing that expensive fake medicine works better than inexpensive fake medicine) explains how corporations sometimes prefer to make decisions: Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on […]

To :) or not to :) ?

Scenario : You are applying for a job via e-mail – is it a good idea to attach a smiley?    :) That depends – according to a report presented at the 25th annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organisational Psychology (2010). Professor Lori Foster Thompson of the Industrial/Organizational Psychology and Technology Lab […]

Improbable Research